This past year has been nothing short of AWESOME for 500 Startups. The #500STRONG family is on every continent except Antarctica, with Venture Partners on the ground in NYC, China, Mexico, Brazil, and Southeast Asia – with more to come!

So what’s the big news? What new superheroes and supervillains have we created or destroyed? What new element have we discovered?

NEW SUPERFRIENDS IN THE VALLEY

FIRST: We’re excited to announce that George Kellerman, our resident attorney, UFC fanboy, X-Games athlete, surfer, and firefighter, has been promoted to Partner (GO GEORGE!). George has been leading 500 Startups’ fundraising efforts and investor relations for more than a year. A former Yahoo Japan & Dell Japan alumnus, George also speaks fluent Nihongo and looks very sexy in a wetsuit (but not in a catsuit).

Dashboard.io is a new community platform for startups, and just announced a seed round of financing from 500 Startups, Quotidian Ventures, Fortify Ventures, NextGen Angels, LX Ventures, Voodoo Ventures, K Street Capital and others. Paul will continue to work with 500 as a Venture Partner and Sith Lord, along with several junior Sith he has previously brought over to the Dark Side in Silicon Valley, DC, Austin, and Mother India.

THIRD: We’re pumped to announce we’ve hired the Ghetto-Fabulous Parker Thompson (*NERDGASM*) as a Venture Partner in the SF Bay Area and the latest addition to the 500 SuperFriends team. He’s gonna do epic sh!t in our accelerator program while giving us massive white-boy grunge hipster cred in the San Francisco startup scene. He comes to 500 from Pivotal Labs, where he built dozens of startup products and helped grow the team from 10 to 150 before the company was acquired in 2012 by EMC. Parker also co-founded a social local mobile photo video filtering daily deals hashtag startup, (srsly, dude invented Pong!) – and worked at Internet Archive on big data problems before the term even existed. Basically, he was working in tech before it was cool.

NEW NOT-SO-SECRET #500STRONG BATCAVE IN GOTHAM

As foreshadowed in our previous episode, we just opened our east coast presence in Manhattan’s historic Flatiron district to support #500Strong NYC-based startups. In addition to providing space for our startups (and 500 Venture Partner Shai Goldman), we’ll use the space to host meetups, tech talks, and kickass parties.

We also we plan on opening a San Francisco office sometime within the next year, and we’ll have more news on that when it happens.

2013’s already off to a great start, and with our next batch just a few weeks away, we think things are only going to get more epic.

Published by Jess Erickson

Jess loves technology, equality and people, which is why she’s 500’s Director of Diversity. She is also the founder of the global women in tech organization Geekettes. A professional surfer of the web, she’s finally ready to settle back at home after seven years abroad and become an amateur surfer of the West Coast waves.